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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Airport non-choices

Since I'm flying to London this morning I thought I'd check out the crime fiction in the airport book shop and perhaps buy an impulse buy. There were two full book cases, but unfortunately very little choice. The shelves were made up of multiples of the same authors - Lee Child, Harlen Coben, Martina Cole, Michael Connolly, PD James, Linda Fairstein, Tess Gerritsen, James Patterson, Kathy Reichs, Karin Slaughter. Perhaps 50 titles between them. Nothing against these authors, but it would have been nice to have some choice and variety. Perhaps two titles per author and the books of 20 others would have help to balance things out. Surprisingly for an Irish airport, the Irish choice was limited to Tana French, Alex Barclay and Paul Carson. Given the amount of quality Irish fiction on release at the minute you would have thought the shelves would be groaning under titles by Brian McGilloway, Declan Hughes, Alan Glynn, Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey, Gene Kerrigan, etc. Very disappointing all round. Hopefully I'll get time to poke my head in a bookshop in London and pick up a couple of books.

3 comments:

It wouldn't have been so bad if it was a kiosk, but this was a great big bookshop. Two full bookcases of crime novels. 10 shelves must hold a couple of hundred books? I'd say there was about 80 titles from 30 authors. Martina Cole had an entire shelf to herself, as did James Patterson. Just put their latest titles in the big piles at the front of the shop, stock a couple of other titles by them here, and stock the rest of the shelves with a decent selection of stuff.

Long and bitter experience has taught me never to rely solely on airport bookshops for reading material. When I unexpectedly find something interesting in one of these shops, I consider it a nice bonus.

About Me

I'm a professor at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the author of four crime novels and two collections of short stories, and author or editor of 25 academic books and a 12 volume encyclopedia. My passions are reading and writing crime fiction and undertaking research on social issues. The other blogs I contribute to are Ireland After NAMA and The Programmable City.